“We all acknowledged to each other that we all liked beautiful music.” Whilst recording their debut, 2020’s Call In The Crash Team, Armitage felt the band had “expected ourselves to be a bit more experimental, a bit more avant-gardist.” The confession freed them up. “We all love harmony and melody,” he continues, “and even though we want to muck around with that stuff, in terms of its structure, and what we do can be quite unusual anyway, at the heart of it we’re trying to do something that’s poignant or profound.” A pause. “Once we’d put those coordinates into the flight deck, that generated quite a lot of writing.”
The Ultraviolet Age is the powerful second album by LYR. More accessible, more poignant, more widescreen, the album is pitched somewhere between the enigmatic brood of late period Talk Talk, the lo-fi expanse of Low and their British sprechgesang contemporaries including Dry Cleaning, Yard Act and Black Country, New Road. It is an album of deft character sketches, dictatorships, the climate crisis and its centrepiece a gorgeous and moving reflection on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Though very much not a lockdown record, The Ultraviolet Age had its genesis in the global pause. “We did our first gig the night that everything shut down, we felt like we had the Medusa touch,” jokes Armitage, “if you want everything to go to shit, come to us.” The band’s debut album Call In The Crash Team, was released in June 2020 to acclaim, followed up by two further EPs of material, but it became clear to LYR’s three parts that the project was about to seriously evolve.
“We did the first album without ever being in the same room together,” explains Walters, “it was a revelation to be a real band as oppose to being a postal service band.” Though still doing some work separately - the band are a coalition of Devon, Hampshire and Yorkshire - the three-piece knew it was time to begin working organically in the same room together. “We suddenly had a clearer grasp of what we could do,” explains Pearson, “it became more refined, and maybe more accessible.”
“(Lockdown) gave us time to rethink what we were doing,” says Armitage, “and actually spend a lot more time writing together, making work together, talking together.” Where the first album had been crafted as a Frankenstein of different ideas and fragments - “which has its own excitements” points out Armitage - the bulk of The Ultraviolet Age was created in the studio together in Devon.
For Armitage, the new working method also meant the freedom to write in new ways. What effect did writing lyrics as lyrics have on the poet? “I feel a little bit as though I’m off the leash,” he explains, “I once heard Margaret Attwood talk about the difference between poetry and prose being that they came out of different hemispheres of the brain. I feel like that about songwriting and poetry, like I’m doing it with my other hand somehow.”
On The Ultraviolet Age, LYR drew from global events and the very human contradictions of modern life. “We talked about themes and moods,” explains Armitage, “the climate crisis, isolation in a world that’s full of possibilities of communication, but where a lot of people are seemingly very lonely. People feeling over conspicuous but also quite alienated at the same time. I wrote into those themes.”
The album’s centrepiece, though, is The Song Thrush and The Mountain Ash. Beginning life as a 2020 commission for Huddersfield Choral Society - who had lost members early into the pandemic to the virus - Walters and Pearson began to craft Armitage’s words into a piece of music as beautiful and graceful as the topic warrants. It is an overdue moment of sonic reflection on a collective trauma.
“When Simon sent the lyrics over, even on paper they’re absolutely heart smashing,” says Walters, “I felt completely broken, I was thinking about my kids, my family, that idea of are we ever going to be the same after this?” Walters describes the song as “yearning, sad and mournful, but beautiful and uplifting in its own way.”
“I think of it as a modern folk song,” offers Armitage, “it’s a bit of a document of social history, this very peculiar time. Things have changed very quickly. The thing that upset me most and struck me about lockdown was not being able to talk to people. Proper interaction.” The song’s central character is someone that Armitage describes as being “stuck in this fog of amnesia” at the time of lockdown. “The song thrush has this incredibly melodious voice and this incredibly vivid tree, but the two things can’t communicate. I’d like to think that there’s some kind of hope in the song, though. It’s a tribute to compassion. I think it’s a compassionate song. The person speaking really cares. It’s an elegy of a kind and in that respect I hope the song is quite a human gesture.”
Meanwhile, there’s plenty of the storming northern noir that has become LYR’s signature. The brooding Paradise Lost, which opens the track, is a track Walters describes as “this weird, dystopian comic drama” that seems to sum up LYR. “It’s got all of the elements that make us as a band,” he explains, “and it feels really ambitious.” Presidentially Yours, which opens with a clattering, insistent electronic beat, carries all the malevolence of its inspirations - dictators, autocrats and despots. “It came off the back of a lot of lockdown misbehaviour by Trump,” says Walters, though the track is not exclusively about any one leader, “it’s pretty dark and menacing and we really wanted to push that.”
Living Legend, meanwhile, is closer to home, a track Armitage describes as “a pen portrait of somebody who is obsessed with somebody from the rock’n’roll past to the point of infatuation or impersonation, maybe even reincarnation.” Listen to the song suddenly take on new power as Armitage reels off the titles of songs - Lay Lady Lay, Purple Rain, Purple Haze, Aladdin Sane, Anarchy In The UK, Sweet Jane, Maggie May, My Way. “I know it’s sarky, that track,” smiles Armitage, “but I like him, the character. He keeps getting up, he keeps standing up. I like his resilience.” The song’s obsessive and funny focus on everyday details is a giveaway to LYR’s lyrical influences. “I’ve always been drawn to songwriters who use a lot of detail, kitchen sink stuff,” explains Armitage, “in my generation that would have been The Smiths and Prefab Sprout.”
Where a few years ago, LYR’s blend of spoken word and moody, sometimes dissonant post-rock might have been seen as inaccessible to some, it’s a cocktail that’s now suddenly the default order of a certain type of British guitar act. “Bands like Dry Cleaning are making it the norm that a spoken word piece doesn’t have to be this pigeonholed, bizarre thing,” says Walters, “it’s just music.”
“I started hearing it everywhere,” agrees Armitage, “I’ve always loved people speaking on records, it’s like they’re off-mic, they’ve taken their costume off.”
As well as bands like Black Country, New Road and Yard Act, Simon points out Isaac Hayes’ twenty minute, sizzling 1969 cut of By The Time I Get To Phoenix. “He’s just talking away,” Simon enthuses, “There are times when singers don’t seem to obliged to sing anymore, they drop into a kind of talk, and I like it. It excites me. Ten years ago, there might have been an attempt that we were doing some kind of performance poetry or spoken word, or rap.”
Moving on, the ambition is to take The Ultraviolet Age out on tour. “We’ve got a lot of material now,” considers Pearson, “and now with this record we’ve got a really strong set, we’ve got a really strong band that plays with us.” By tapping into human connection and the biggest questions of modern living, LYR have delivered one of 2023’s most surprising, expansive and poignant albums.
